Newly-Discovered Planet Is The First To Have Four Suns

Haven Giguere/Yale.An artist's illustration of PH1, a planet discovered by volunteers from the Planet Hunters citizen science project. PH1, shown in the foreground, is a circumbinary planet and orbits two suns.

A newly discovered planet is the first to have four suns. The planet, named PH1, is around 5,000 light-years away and is about 6.2 times the size of our planet. It's a gas giant similar to Neptune, researchers said.

The planet orbits a pair of stars once every 138 days. Further out in orbit lies another twinned set of stars, which also orbit the center pair. This is the first planet discovered in a four-star system.

"All four stars pulling on it creates a very complicated environment. Yet there it sits in an apparently stable orbit," Chris Lintott, of the University of Oxford, told the BBC. "That's really confusing, which is one of the things which makes this discovery so fun. It's absolutely not what we would have expected."

The discovery was detailed by researcher Meg Schwamb, from Yale University, in a presentation Oct. 15 at the annual meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society, and detailed in a pre-print paper at arxiv. It has been submitted to the Astrophysical Journal.

What's great about the discovery, other than its unique nature, is the fact it's the first find from the volunteer Planet Hunters program, which uses private citizens to analyze data from NASA's Kepler Spacecraft. The find was made by Kian Jeck of San Francisco and Robert Gagliano of Arizona, and confirmed by Yale researchers.

The tell-tale signal of a planet is the dip in light coming from it's main star as the exoplanet passes in front of it.

Here's another mock up of the system. You can see the second pair of suns out past the first, looking like large stars or moons:Haven Giguere/Yale. A family portrait of the PH1 planetary system: The newly discovered planet is depicted in this artist's rendition transiting the larger of the two eclipsing stars it orbits. Off in the distance, well beyond the planet orbit, resides a second pair of stars bound to the planetary system.